Most wind farms around the world have no history of complaints, but the few that do have seen the local area targeted by external activists who spread panic. Simon Chapman reflects on the nonsense claims of anti-wind farm activists.

Later today, the Senate will release the report of a committee into a Private Senators' Bill examining the proposal that wind turbines should not be accredited if the sound emitted exceeds 10 decibels of the background noise at any time, measured within 22 metres of a house.

The Bill was proposed by Democratic Labor Party Senator John Madigan and independent Senator Nick Xenophon. Both have form in expressing opposition to wind farms.

No one following the latest historical example of what is quite plainly technophobic Luddism has any doubt that the tabling will see a minority report that the proposed standard be adopted. The bill will be defeated on party lines, with the Greens supporting the Government. But it has provided a conduit for a Niagara of mostly boilerplate protest material from the tiny but highly organised opponent groups.

While the bill is purportedly about noise levels in the audible spectrum, the focus of many fear-laden submissions has been around the sub-audible low-frequency noise - infrasound - that wind turbines (and pretty much all machines) create. While studies have shown (PDF) that Australians living near the coast or in cities are constantly subject to far greater 'doses' of infrasound, apparently the sort emitted by wind turbines has a special flavour that causes a never-before-seen medical condition.

"Wind turbine syndrome" is a term coined in a self-published book by a US small town doctor who personally opposed a wind farm proposed near her property. Tellingly, the term does not appear once among 22 million papers indexed by PubMed, the US National Library of Medicine's repository of peer reviewed research published in acknowledged journals.

With now 217 diseases and symptoms claimed to be caused by exposure to the sub-audible, low frequency infrasound emitted by wind turbines - some by as little as a few minutes exposure - there are undeniable and rhino-in-the-room size clues that complaints are psychogenic: "communicated" diseases spread by the nocebo effect. This is where dramatically and repeatedly suggesting to people that something is likely to make you ill, triggers claims and sometimes symptomatic illness in a minority of people.

Most wind farms around the world and in Australia have no history of complaints, and most of those which do, have seen the local area targeted by external anti-wind farm activists who spread panic and tell frightened locals to report anything they might experience to their doctor. The activist groups even provide symptom menus to assist residents.

Wind farms have existed in Western Australia for nearly 20 years, yet no company operating over there has ever received a health complaint. Significantly, there are no anti-wind farm group operating in the state.

By contrast, here's a case study of how complaints can get going on the east coast.

In early October 2010, residents of Leonards Hill in central Victoria were encouraged to attend a presentation in Evansford, given by an unregistered doctor, Sarah Laurie, who has become Australia's high priestess of wind farm anxiety. Laurie believes (PDF)that turbulence from wind turbines can "perceptibly rock stationary cars even further than a kilometre away from the nearest wind turbine" and told a meeting (PDF) in 2011 that spending a night near wind turbines can cause "just about everybody ...every five or ten minutes needing to go to the toilet."

In the same week, the Australian Environment Foundation, a deceptively named climate change denialist group, arranged a protest meeting at the opening ceremony for the beginning of works on a two turbine, 2,000 shareholder community-owned wind farm at Leonards Hill, near Daylesford. Banners with "Wind farms make me sick" were prepared and some 50 people (mostly out of towners) attended the protest, which was reported in the local press.

In November, Laurie was reported in local newspaper The Advocate as saying "If I were living right there I would be very concerned. I would be beside myself..." Scary stuff.

In early December 2010, the president of the Landscape Guardians told the Australian "I've been on medication for the last five years just fighting this." The wind farm had not even opened but the president was already worried sick.

In mid August 2011, the Ballarat Courier reported that Leonards Hill received its first health complaint from a 57-year-old woman with sleep problems. She described the sound of the two turbines, half a kilometre away, as at times "like a jet engine". (Like hundreds of thousands of Sydney residents, I've lived right under the Sydney fight path for 22 years, and I've spent time around wind farms. The comparison is nothing less than ludicrous). The next day, the Landscape Guardians president went public as the second health complainant about the wind farm.

Those who study the dynamics of psychogenic illness place the communication of scary information front and centre of this psychogenic/nocebo process. Early next year, a leading international psychology journal will publish findings of a study that will add important new evidence to this debate.

The study took healthy volunteers and exposed some to information from the internet designed to prime them to expect that infrasound from wind farms could make them experience symptoms. They labelled this group the "high expectations" group. Another group were not exposed to such information (the "low expectations" group). Both groups were then exposed in a laboratory to both real and "sham" (fake) infrasound. The high expectation group reported a significant increase in symptoms during both exposure sessions, while there was no increase in symptoms reported in the low expectation group.

In Canada an anti-wind farm group took a wind company to a local tribunal, with a cavalcade of complainants emotionally detailing their health problems. The tribunal agreed with the wind company that the medical records of all complainants going back a decade should be presented. These would reveal how many of the victims had a prior history of the problems they now complained about. The case then collapsed, with the complainants protesting that this was too onerous a requirement.

All social groups, workplaces and organisations have individuals with reputations for whinging and negativity. So perhaps unsurprisingly, a recent British study found that "negative orientated personality" traits predicted unexplained non-specific symptoms among residents near a wind farm, and not actual noise.

Ten years ago, the media was full of anxiety that mobile telephone towers would bring down plagues of diseases on those around them. Local governments passed nonsensical regulations allowing towers on factory roofs, but nowhere near sporting fields, schools or even nursing homes (where most residents had highly limited life expectancy anyway). The predicted epidemics of brain cancer never happened, there are more mobile phones than Australian residents and the anxiety disappeared.

Todays's expected report will contain the equivalent nonsense about wind farms. It will make interesting reading 10 years from now.

Simon Chapman is professor of public health at the University of Sydney. He tweets @simonchapman6. View his full profile here.